1. Field of Invention
The present disclosure relates to a method for providing thermotolerance of a plant. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to a method for providing basal thermotolerance of a transgenic plant and genetic engineering applications thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
In the suitable environment, the growth and reproduction of plants are improved. On the other hand, the environmental variation may affect and be harmful to the plant growth. The environmental stresses, such as water deprivation, flood, heat, cold, chemical, heavy metal, peroxides poisonings, etc., may be harmful to the plants. Since those environmental stresses affect the growth or even survival of plants, finding out the mechanism of stress responses of plants can improve crop varieties and increase the yield and quality of crop.
The current global climate change is unusually warming or cooling. For instance, the greenhouse effect creates a heat stress for plant growth, and results in ecological calamity and food shortage problems. Over the past years, the research of heat stress response of plants was focused on heat shock proteins (HSPs), a class of functionally related proteins whose expression increase when cells are exposed to elevated temperatures or other stress, to investigate the short-term heat stress response of the plants. Heat shock proteins have a chaperone function in protein refolding. If a plant is placed at a higher, but not a lethal temperature, the heat shock proteins play an important role in protein-protein interactions to assist the refolding of the heat-denatured proteins to their proper conformation or prevent undesired protein misfolding and aggregation. These mechanisms are essential for plant survival after undergoing the short-term and lethally heat stress.
However, there is no further investigation of long-term, continuously heat stress response of plants. The long-term stresses affect the growth of plants; hence finding out the mechanism of long-term heat stress responses of plants can contribute to improving crop varieties, and increasing the yield and quality of crop.
In general, there are two ways to give the thermotolerance of a plant to resist the heat stress. One is to screen a mutant plant with a naturally occurring thermotolerance mutation. The other is to express one or more thermotolerance-related protein in a plant by using molecular biotechnology.